Today, the afterlife of communism is equally about monuments and half-ironic memes, retro aesthetics, movie series and board games. Far from being confined to archives or secondary sources, references to socialist period survive throughout everyday cultural forms and reveal a way of processing histories that were never fully resolved.
In our conversation with Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery, built around their edited volume Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, this tension comes into focus. Published this year by the Central European University Press/ Amsterdam University Press, the book presents how cultural productions do not simply represent the socialist period but also give new meanings and emotional textures.
Throughout our conversation, we explore the theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of nostalgia and trauma. Their central claim challenges the familiar binary between nostalgia and opposition. As Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery stated in their introduction, they follow van Liere and Sremac’s understanding of trauma, which is: “the remembrance of a painful irrevocable past scatters in different modalities of culture, politics, and religion and contributes to new forms of longing and belonging. In this process, nostalgia is a powerful vehicle to (re)present painful pasts in the present while mobilizing hybrid forms of identity and counter-identity.” (p27)
Instead of opposing nostalgia with trauma, Anna Váradi argues that these concepts should be analyzed together. As she stated in the podcast, “for us, trauma and nostalgia are best understood as coexisting forces that shape contemporary engagement with the past”. More specifically, nostalgia often carries unresolved trauma, while trauma itself can be reactivated through selective, even comforting narratives about the past. At the same time, trauma does not disappear. It returns, refracted through stories, images and collective narratives that give new political uses.
Their chapter on the film series Deutschland 89 makes this analysis more tangible. Moments that feel nostalgic, music, shared habits, familiar images, are never neutral. They are tied to experiences of control, division, and adaptation. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall does not appear as a clean break, but as a moment that leaves lasting confusion and imbalance, still visible in political divides today. As the chapter concludes, “the Deutschland series depicts differences between life in the DDR as opposed to the BRD and the rootlessness experienced during die Wende through plotlines that trace the inescapability of past traumas for East Germans.” (p160)
Across the volume, similar patterns emerge. Museums, online humor or board games do not simply preserve the past. Instead, they reorganize it and turn memory into a field of negotiations where identities are redefined. Among others, Carmen Levick examines how the Romanian Revolution is curated at the History Museum of Braşov, while Kateryna Yeremieieva shows how Soviet-era anecdotes are recycled in contemporary Russian online media. Lucia Szemetová, in turn, explores Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Retro Series and the cultural afterlife of Hungarian state propaganda films. Across these cases, the past is not simply preserved but actively negotiated, revealing how memory, culture and politics remain tightly intertwined.
In case this book sparked your interest, make sure you attend the book launch on April 16 from 5:30 PM at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest and livestreamed on Youtube.
Lucy Jeffery is Co-Founder of the Replaying Communism project. She has published on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021. She then co-edited a special issue for the leading environmental literature journal, Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space’ (2022). In 2024 she was a Visegrad Fellow at Central European University and the Open Society Archives.
Anna Váradi is Co-Founder of the Replaying Communism project. She has published on media, gender, and national identity in the work of Magda Szabó, and has served as a translator from Hungarian and German for several academic projects. Since 2020, she has worked extensively with displaced people and forced migrants who are pursuing Higher Education. Anna currently works at Cardiff University, Wales.
The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file.
